Chamath Palihapitiya’s Post

Deep Dives for the Rest of 2024: Our full content calendar of Deep Dives for the rest of the year is outlined below. Let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions for topics we should cover.

What I Read This Week… - The U.S. economy added 206,000 jobs in June 2024, exceeding expectations, but the unemployment rate rose to 4.1%, its highest level since November 2021. What do these mixed signals mean for the Federal Reserve's interest rate policy? - The investment world is increasingly focused on geopolitical risks, with many financial firms hiring geopolitical advisors and former government officials to help navigate a more complex global landscape. What's driving this trend? - Europe's major militaries are facing significant personnel shortages, with countries like Germany, the UK, France, and Italy struggling to recruit and retain soldiers. What's driving these recruitment challenges, and how are European countries trying to address them? More below...

The world is currently experiencing a significant geopolitical shift, marked by active conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, rising tensions in the Red Sea, and mounting concerns over a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Amid this geopolitical backdrop, we are presented with seemingly conflicting data points. The U.S. has been the world's preeminent military power for the past 70 years, yet the conflict in Ukraine has exposed shortages in critical U.S. weaponry such as Javelin missiles, and new enlistments in the U.S. military are near an all-time low over a 40-year period. How do we make sense of this? To evaluate the U.S.'s position in the current world order, we study the evolution of warfare from the Industrial Revolution to today. Rather than a historical analysis, we focus on a topic less discussed but equally important: how the arc of technological progress has led to the emergence of new military capabilities. This through-line in the evolution of warfare leads us to the current paradigm: the development of weapons with human-like capabilities that can be manufactured at scale, exemplified first by the emergence of drone warfare. This paradigm is the basis for our exploration into the future of warfare, which discusses how autonomous weapons and other cutting-edge technologies may redefine combat tactics and grand strategy once again. We also examine the U.S. defense industry: first how the military-industrial complex is designed to work, and then where the military-industrial complex deviates from its intended design. We look at the “Big Five” defense contractors - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies, and General Dynamics - as well as technology startups like Anduril and Saildrone. To tie everything together, we go through two case studies: the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War and a potential China-Taiwan conflict. You can read our full deep dive using the link below: https://lnkd.in/gfAb-GaK

What I Read This Week… - Alibaba's large language model, Qwen, is currently ranked as the number one open-source model on Hugging Face's LLM Leaderboard, outperforming competitors such as Meta's Llama 3 70B and Mistral AI's Mixtral 8x22B. What is driving Qwen’s performance? - The Supreme Court has overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine in a 6-3 decision. This ruling nullifies a 40-year-old precedent that required federal courts to defer to federal agencies' interpretations of ambiguous laws, transferring interpretive power away from the federal agencies. What is the significance of this ruling? - China’s state-run CCTV released a video of a robot dog armed with an assault rifle in a recent joint military exercise with Cambodia. The video shows Chinese soldiers standing on both sides of a doorway while a robot dog enters the building ahead of them, as well as a video of another robot dog firing a burst of bullets as it advances on a target. More below:

What I Read This Week… - Nvidia's market capitalization recently passed the $3 trillion mark, surpassing Microsoft and Apple as the most valuable company in the United States. Nvidia now also accounts for 34.5% of the S&P 500's growth this year. So what's the problem? - Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet this week, the first release in a forthcoming Claude 3.5 model family. Notably, Claude 3.5 Sonnet excels in the Graduate-level Proficiency Question Answering (GPQA) assessment, which is designed to assess advanced academic understanding across various disciplines, testing complex reasoning and knowledge application typically associated with graduate-level education. - The ADVANCE Act, a bill aimed at boosting nuclear energy development in the U.S., has been passed by Congress and is now awaiting President Biden’s signature to become law. The Act seeks to streamline processes for next-generation reactor development, position the US as a leader in the international nuclear market, and help keep aging reactors operational. More below...

What I Read This Week... - The Labor Department reported Wednesday that CPI held steady at 3.3%. Later that day, Powell announced during June’s FOMC meeting that he is looking for signs that inflation is moving towards the Fed’s 2% target before considering rate cuts. This marks a shift in stance from recent meetings where Powell suggested that the Fed would cut rates during the latter half of this year. Why the shift? - Apple announced Apple Intelligence, a platform that leverages generative AI and users' personal data to enhance their devices' capabilities. Notably, this includes a system-wide integration with ChatGPT, which allows Siri to delegate complex user requests to ChatGPT. What are the implications of Apple's announcement? - China is emerging as a scientific superpower, surpassing the U.S. and EU in both highly-cited publications and contributions to prestigious journals like Nature. What has driven China's emergence as a scientific superpower? More below...

We will be publishing our deep dive on the U.S. defense industry at the end of this month, covering everything from what the Department of Defense spends money on to how warfare is conducted on the battlefield today. Like our previous deep dives, we will build from the ground up, assuming no prior knowledge about the U.S. defense industry. Here's what we'll cover: - Basics of the U.S. defense industry and our military presence worldwide - The history of warfare, from the Industrial Revolution to the post-Cold War era - How war is conducted today and how technology is shaping the future of war - The business of defense, including the major defense contractors - Case studies on current conflicts we are involved in If you are interested, you can subscribe below to read our deep dive when we publish it at the end of this month. Let us know if there is anything else you would like us to cover. chamath.substack.com

What I Read This Week... - After a three-year hiatus since the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, Keith Gill, also known as RoaringKitty, posted a meme on X that caused GameStop’s stock to triple. This has sparked debate over whether Keith’s actions constitute market manipulation under SEC rules. Is it market manipulation? - Scientists involved in a groundbreaking clinical trial have successfully restored hearing in five children born with DFNB9, a form of inherited deafness. How does this therapy work? - Elite universities have become bastions of progressive ideology, with 65% of Harvard’s 2023 graduating class identifying as progressive or very progressive, and with the opinion section at The Harvard Crimson leaning significantly more progressive over the past two decades. What is driving this? More below... https://lnkd.in/ghfxR8wW

Every day, we make decisions about which products and services to consume. With countless options and categories to choose from, how do we end up selecting certain products over others? More than $60T is spent annually by consumers on various products and services so this month’s deep dive focuses on the changing nature of how consumers are influenced. In a world where we often lack the time or expertise to evaluate every option, the media initially drove consumption decisions by selling advertising about which products and services were best, most valuable, or most suitable. To understand how media will drive consumption decisions in the future, we look to the past to investigate the underlying economic dynamics that have driven its evolution. Through our investigation, we uncovered four distinct phases of media. Each new phase of media disrupted the previous as content consumption habits changed and the rise of the internet led to an explosion of content and information online. TV was disrupted by the rise of streaming and the web. As social media rose, it took a growing share of time spent online. And today, some influencers on social media have begun to eclipse the size of social media sites themselves, resulting in a radical shift in how demand is being generated for products and services. This leads us to the current phase: the creator economy. While putting together this deck, I was surprised by the sheer scale of the opportunity in the creator economy. With a global GDP of $100 trillion per year, and more than 60% of this driven by household consumption, influencers are creating a seismic shift in how demand is generated for trillions of dollars of goods and services. We are already seeing evidence of this today, as influencers like MrBeast and Kim Kardashian build massive consumer goods businesses on the back of their captive audiences. But they aren’t the only ones. We end our deep dive with an analysis of Elon Musk, the world’s first Mega-Influencer, who has built several massive businesses by following the playbook we outline in the deck. You can read our full deep dive using the link below: https://lnkd.in/gCfkAmPP

What I Read This Week... - Salesforce’s share price dropped more than 20% after releasing its Q2 2024 earnings, despite earnings falling just 0.3% below Wall Street analysts' expectations. What's going on? - The AI revolution is already losing steam as investors are becoming more cautious about generative AI, recognizing that the current spending doesn't match its near-term potential to drive returns. Why is this happening? - A new study by Kyoto University and the University of Fukui has discovered that an antibody for the gene USAG-1 can stimulate tooth growth in mice and ferrets, offering hope for adult humans with tooth loss. How does this work? More below... https://lnkd.in/g2yjMFE4